Guitar necks usually have a plurality of spaced apart frets on the guitar neck and a fixed guitar nut. The nut has a plurality of grooves to allow for strings to sit therein. Frets are the raised portions on the neck of stringed instruments that generally extends across the full width of the neck. Most often the frets are metal strips inserted into the fingerboards on the neck. Frets are generally used to divide the neck into fixed segments at intervals related to a musical framework. On instruments such as guitar, each fret can represents one semitone where one octave is divided into twelve semitones.
The nut of a stringed instrument is a small piece of hard material which supports the strings at the end closest to the headstock. The nut marks one end of the speaking length of each open string, sets the spacing of the strings across the neck, and usually holds the strings at the proper height from the fingerboard. Along with the bridge the nut defines the vibrating lengths (scale lengths) of the open strings. The nut can be made of ebony, ivory, cow bone, brass, Corian or plastic, and is usually notched or grooved for the strings. The grooves are designed to lead the string from the bridge to the headstock so separate the strings and to provide a proper break angle for correct string vibration.
Most prior art stringed instruments, such as guitars have a single nut, and then have a plurality of frets, the first of which is spaced apart from the nut. The single nut can only be replaced with another single nut. To make a proper nut requires that each string notch be carefully cut to the proper depth so that the string is neither too high, affecting overall string height and intonation of fretted notes, nor too low which causes a plucked or picked string to buzz against the frets.
Some guitars and mandolins have nuts that are just string spacers, with deep notches. These instruments use a zero fret, which is a fret at the beginning of the scale where a normal nut would be, which is higher than the other frets to provide the correct string clearance. The zero fret is often found on cheaper instruments, as it's much easier to set up an instrument this way. With a zero fret, the fret merely needs to be the right height. However, a zero fret also makes the sound of the open string very similar to the fretted note, where the nut itself, being made of a different material, has a different timbre if it is used instead of a zero fret. Zero frets are fixed into the neck and are not easily removable.
The prior art has problems with tuning and sound quality when just using nuts since the strings may have friction by resting on the inner sides and bottom of the nut slots. There is no easy way of tuning the slots on the nuts when used by themselves.
None of the prior art allows for a combined nut with fret that can be used to replace a single nut on the stringed instrument.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.